


whatever a sun will always sing

by theprimrosepath



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: (Just a little bit), Angst and Feels, Brotherly Affection, Family Fluff, Gen, Loki (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), References to Norse Religion & Lore, Spells & Enchantments, dad thor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 11:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprimrosepath/pseuds/theprimrosepath
Summary: The doorbell rang, and Thor smiled. "Your uncle's here," he said.





	whatever a sun will always sing

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know why i did this and now i'm upset

The doorbell rang, and Thor smiled. "Your uncle's here," he said.

Feet pattered on the floor beside him as he went to the front door and unlocked it with a loud clack. Thor opened it, but only by a thin and suspicious sliver. "Hello," he greeted, peering through with narrowed eyes. Loki stared at him from the other side of the door and raised his eyebrows. "Password, please."

"I could teleport inside right now," Loki informed him.

"Psst," said a small voice by Thor's feet. Thor pretended not to hear it. "The password's _Strongest Avenger_."

Loki glanced down and smiled. "Ah. So it is. However, I refuse to entertain your father's ridiculous and utterly egotistical joke." His figure disappeared in a shimmer of green, and a second later the child by Thor's feet was squealing and spinning around to run back into the room.

Thor grinned and turned around, closing the door, to see his daughter throwing herself into Loki's outstretched arms. "Oof," he said, and spun her around. She giggled, arms and legs outstretched like she was trying to fly. "What has your father been feeding you, Thrud?"

"Cheerios," Thrud replied matter-of-factly as Loki set her back down.

"That doesn't sound like a healthy diet."

"The box says they're good for your heart." Thrud said this as if she was an expert on what made foods good for your heart, or perhaps on the details of Cheerios cereal packaging. "Hearts are very important for your health."

"Indeed they are," Loki said, mouth twitching as he looked at Thor.

Thor beamed. _Isn't she the best?_

Loki rolled his eyes—as if Thor didn't already know that his little brother loved his niece as if she was his own.

"Let's go outside!" Thrud implored, tugging on Loki's hand. It was a stunning image: a tall, lanky man in all black whom Thor had fought alongside blood-splattered on battlefields, with a girl who only came up to his knees trying to command him while dressed in a bright green sundress. "I want to play."

"I just arrived from outside," Loki said. "Where are your brothers, hm?"

"In their room. Pabbi says they can't play outside with me because they're still too little."

"Pabbi would be right. They are far too young. Let's go see them first, shall we?" Loki held out his arms again and Thrud willingly climbed in, smiling as Loki hoisted her up with a grunt. She was starting to get too big for carrying, even for Thor; he had to admire how determined his brother was to hide the effort.

Thor leaned over and ruffled his daughter's hair. Immediately she shook her head, swatting at his hand. "Pabbi!" she yelled in protest. Loki snickered.

They walked over to the nursery, which was a large room tastefully decorated in primary colors and everything that children could possibly be entertained by. Two twin boys in blue and orange onesies, respectively, crawled along the floor, patting the carpet with their hands as curiously as they had been since they'd first began. Loki set Thrud down with a near-inaudible sigh of relief, and she ran over to guide her brothers toward their father and uncle.

"I can't understand how you do this, brother," Loki said as Thrud attempted to drag a complaining Modi over by his waist. "Three of them."

"It's a lot of work," Thor agreed.

Loki had mercy on Thrud and waved a hand. With glimmers of green and gold _seiðr_ , Modi floated through the air and into his arms. The tiny child gurgled, and Loki poked gently at his cheek with a finger.

Thor bent down to pick up Magni and bounced him in his arms, savoring the soft weight of him. He had thought at first that he would grow tired of young children eventually, as some parents he'd met and heard from seemed to feel, but they never lost their novelty to him. He really was going to miss this once Modi and Magni grew older. He placed a thumb in Magni's palm, and his tiny fingers curled around it.

Thrud _ooh_ -ed and _ah_ -ed, and Thor glanced over to see Loki's hand dancing above Modi. Every time he cupped his palm and let it tilt as if spilling something, a soft spark of light tumbled out to drift downward as slowly as a feather. Modi giggled and reached for each conjuration with clumsy hands, and each one he brushed dissipated in a cloud of iridescent glitter. Thrud waved her hands through these and prodded at the sparks he missed, bursting them herself with eyes wide in fascination.

Loki was smiling. The green of his eyes seemed to glow as the corners of his eyes crinkled, and Thor's throat caught on an inexplicable lump.

"Let's go outside," Thor finally suggested.

And so he found himself tromping through his backyard in the warm afternoon sun, searching with hand shading his eyes for any 'suspicious' creatures amidst the grass. "Loki, Thrud," he called, each word drawn out with playfulness. "I can't find you two. Where are you?"

A second later, he caught sight of something slithering past his foot, and he grinned.

"Ah, a snake!" Thor chased after it, placing a boot right in front of its path in time for it to crawl over. Quickly, he lifted his foot and grabbed the snake, a gorgeous, mature smooth green snake that slid through his fingers and darted a bright pink tongue. Unusually, it had gold markings along its head, and Thor stroked these.

He looked around and spotted another line of rustling grass, and soon he had two snakes in his hands. The new one was a much younger member of the same species, its scales blue-gray in coloration. "How beautiful," Thor said, still grinning. "I do adore snakes."

As if on cue, the two snakes glowed, and then Thor was stumbling back laughing as both Loki and Thrud jabbed at him with sticks. "You should've never been fooled, brother," Loki cried, mock-stabbing him in the chest.

"We tricked you!" Thrud laughed.

Under the onslaught, Thor groaned loudly and fell to the ground, Thrud leaping on top of him and enthusiastically attacking every part of his body she could reach. "I have been felled," he declared, tossing an arm over his eyes dramatically. "Defeated by the mighty Thrud."

Loki firmly nudged his side with a foot, and Thor added, "And her companion-in-arms, Loki."

Ages later, he and Loki sat together on the back porch of the house, shaded from the sun. Thor had pulled out a bottle of homemade mead, and the two of them were drinking it from wine glasses as they watched Thrud courageously battle an illusion of a bear. A gentle breeze ruffled Thor's hair as cicadas whined from the trees, and he closed his eyes with a smile. Perhaps it was not Asgard, but it was a good place to call home.

(It was not Asgard. Why did that strike him so?)

"What are you thinking about, brother?" Loki asked.

"Just how nice it is to live here," he replied, opening his eyes again. Thrud ducked under a swing from the bear's paw with a shriek, but Thor could see how slow and obviously telegraphed the attack was.

Loki hummed. "I wouldn't call it nice. Asgard was nice. Even your friend's old tower would better count as nice. Perhaps _quaint_."

"Don't judge my housing choices while you drink my mead."

Loki laughed and quieted. Thor smiled again, sipping his mead and thinking of when he would down the drink by the tankards instead, drowning in noise and celebration as he dined at one of Asgard's massive feasting halls. Again, though, the thought struck some strange chord inside him, and he frowned.

Loki had said _was_.

(He would never be able to feast at one of the halls again.)

"Loki," Thor said. "How is Asgard?"

For a long moment, Loki said nothing. Then he sighed and set down his glass, and the sun no longer felt warm. "Asgard is gone, Thor," he replied quietly.

Thor's mind spun. "Gone?"

Loki looked out upon the backyard, where Thrud yelled as she struck the final blow on the bear with her toy sword. The bear collapsed on the grass with a mighty groan and dissolved into ripples of green. "I wish we could have had this. It was a pleasant dream while it lasted."

"What?" Thor stared at Loki, but he wouldn't meet his eyes. "Loki, what are you—"

—

"Thor! Thor, wake up!"

Someone was shaking his shoulder desperately. Thor's eyes snapped open and focused on Bruce's pale, worried face. He was on the floor, slumped against a wall, and Bruce knelt in front of him in a dark hall. No daughter, no grassy backyard, no Loki.

"Oh, thank god," Bruce said with a sigh.

Thor blinked blearily. He reached up to his face and felt tears on his left cheek, below his good eye. "What happened?"

"The sorcerer we've been fighting knocked you out for a while with some kind of spell. The others are chasing him down now. He got spooked after you started fighting it off."

Thor recalled now: a sorcerer from off-planet had broken into the facility in search of the current fruits of their Infinity Stone research. Somehow, that meant word was getting out of their experiments, and they'd needed to capture him alive to find out _how_ and put a stop to it. If Thanos caught wind, it could mean disaster. Apparently, it was causing more trouble than they had expected. "That was no ordinary spell," Thor growled, clasping Bruce's arm, "to entrance me so thoroughly."

"Maybe not," Bruce agreed, and with a groan, helped lift Thor off the floor. His knees still felt wobbly, but he ground his teeth against the weakness and straightened. He hoped the others were not underestimating the sorcerer, lest he use that spell again; truly, it must have been powerful.

 _Or perhaps,_ a thought that sounded like Loki suggested, _you were entrapped for so long because a part of you wanted it to be real._

Thor sucked in a breath and wiped what was left of the tears from his face, called Stormbreaker to his hand from the floor. The details of the dream were already fading from his mind, too quickly to be natural, but he could still remember Loki's smile, the way his face had lit up when he'd spun his dream-niece around in circles. _I wish we could have had this,_ he had said on the porch, soft and regretful.

Thor's throat tightened. "No ordinary spell," he repeated. "Come, Bruce. We must rejoin our friends."

"Right. This way." Bruce jogged off down the hall, and Thor followed.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at [@primrose-path-of-dalliance](https://primrose-path-of-dalliance.tumblr.com) on tumblr, where i post fandom things and the occasional bit of writing.


End file.
